we hired an agency with some people specialized in communication to maintain dialogue with the public.
Quoted for reference. So you admit to hiring bump spammers. For your own financial gain, you pay people to spam this forum. Let me put it nicely: not cool!
We haven't hired anyone to spam, but to maintain the social area of the project. If those employees made mistakes and put a bad light on our project, we will analyze the collaboration with them. First of all, we also need a point of view from them, because for our team, we've just discovered the incident.
Anyway, it is not so unusual for a project to employ specialized agencies.
The whole purpose for communication and marketing agencies is to offer services to some projects.
Our only regret is that we have not closely followed their activity.